Amazon's LoveFilm Takes On Netflix

Amazon’s LoveFilm, the European DVD and streaming movie service announced on Monday that they plan to take on Netflix. The company will compete with the British service by streaming movies and TV shows that normally belong to News Corp's Twentieth Century Fox TV unit, says Reuters.

The competition between companies that stream movies has just become tougher due to the agreement that LoveFilm has signed with another Hollywood studio. The Amazon-based company will, thus, have the authority to stream movies and DVDs that were created by Twentieth Century Fox. This move gives LoveFilm the power they needed to take over the British service provided by Netflix.

The announcement wrote that LoveFilm will gain exclusive access to some of the TV shows produced by Fox. Among them, Internet users will be able to watch series like “24” and “Sons of Anarchy”. The UK-based service has signed numerous other deals, including one with NBC Universal, one with Sony and another one with Warner Brothers. They insisted on obtaining streaming rights from the previously mentioned companies because they wanted subscribers to be able to watch series like “The Dark Knight” and “Sex and the City 2”.

One of the spokespersons from LoveFilm explained reporters at Reuters that the deals that were signed also cover the so-called “second pay window”. This means that the streaming services have to wait several months before they can get the rights for the movies and the TV shows. Until then, pay channels have the right to air those productions.

Although LoveFilm has only been under Amazon’s protection for a year, the streaming service has 2 million subscribers. The majority of them are set in Britain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. The British service provided by Netflix, on the other hand, has 23 million subscribers in the United States and 3 million in Canada, Latin America and Britain. They plan to gather many more subscriptions in the future thanks to the deals they have signed for movies and TV shows produced by Disney, NBC, Paramount, Fox, etc.